Tough love for literature

Tag Archives: how much quiche should one man eat

This week we’re returning to our Summer of Spouses season to discuss John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, a memoir about his marriage to Iris Murdoch, written while she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Both of us had heard good things about the book, and were eager to check it out. We’d also read a number of articles about Bayley’s and Murdoch’s sex life–which seems to come up nearly any time someone discusses their marriage–and so were curious about how the book might treat that subject.

In the second half of the show, we talk about the way spouses can support (or not support) their writer spouses, and how having a supportive spouse can make a huge–and often unacknowledged–difference in a writer’s life. This article from The Atlantic (which we discuss briefly) delves into a number of contemporary examples. We also go to Yahoo Answers to see what kinds of problems people need help with in their marriages. This week, those problems include a husband who eats too much quiche, and one who’s a little too into the single mom next door.

As always, you can stream the episode right here on our site, or download the mp3 file. You can also find us in the iTunes store, or in just about any app you might use to listen to podcasts.

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